Miguel Sicart is a Professor of Digital Play at the Center for Digital Play, IT University of Copenhagen (www.digitalplay.itu.dk).
Miguel is a philosopher of technology who enjoys playing with computers, questioning them in the process. He is the author of Play Matters (MIT Press, 2014), and Playing Software (MIT Press, 2023), as well as research on game ethics, game design, and philosophy. He is currently working on the ridiculous software project (www.ridiculous.software).
Ingrid Kopp is a co-founder of Electric South in South Africa, a non-profit organisation working with interdisciplinary artists across Africa to develop, produce and distribute immersive work.
In this role, she produces and facilitates a series of labs and workshops, and is an executive producer on award winning VR projects, including The Other Dakar, Le Lac, Azibuye – The Ocupation, and Container. Along with MIT’s Open DocLab and Dot Connector Studio, she produces Immerse, a monthly publication on emerging nonfiction storytelling. She is co-chair of the World Economic Forum Global Council on the Metaverse.
Until 2020 Ingrid curated the Tribeca Storyscapes programme for interactive and immersive work at the Tribeca Film Festival. Before moving back to South Africa in 2015 Ingrid was director of the Interactive Department at the Tribeca Film Institute in the US. She started her career at Channel 4 Television in the UK.
Kasper Jacek is a self-taught visual artist, cultural journalist and website creator based in Odder/Aarhus, Denmark.
He has been working with research dissemination for more than ten years, co-founding the research-based online magazine and publisher Baggrund.com in 2012. He has co-created websites for research projects such as ECHOES Keywords, Socialist Medicine, INTERVENTIONS and Global Inequality. Most recently he has created the website for Playing With Ghosts.
His artistic work is a continuation of his academic and journalistic work on the subject of place, working with the historicity of places, the mythologies and memories bound to certain places and exploring new ways to tell stories about so-called ‘dead’ objects. Find more information on his website: www.kasperjacek.com
Vivi Vold is part of the work in the upcoming biology-program in Ilisimatusarfik, University of Greenland, and her research is called 'Silami nipaatsumi naapitta' and can be translated to “Let us meet outside in silence”. Her Anaana is Emma Vold whom is Indigenous Inuk from southern part of Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) and her Pappa is from Norway a non- Indigenous. Both of them are in the other side and are with her in spirit.
In this project, the desire-based framework is applied to acknowledge Kalaallit strengths and competencies, that can support the creation of equitable and ethical interactions and relationships in scientific research and scientific education in Kalaallit Nunaat.
Sila - which means the outer world/weather and also means the inner world - our contagiousness
Nipaatsoq - which means silence - in this we mean that when we are silent and create space for the silence in our work, we know and can sense what is important, what is our knowledge and also what comes up from inside.
The most important part is the position we as researcher are in - this reflect the space and position we are in the research we are facilitating in connection with the communities . When we are silent there are space to really listen to what the community knows, what the community want in relation to not only research but also in general. Silence is in other words also the spirituality speaking to us - guiding us in ways we normally won’t listen to. Our ways was to do storytelling and let everyone speak and let them finish and we listen - this is also the silence getting
As with these words, her work is not only to unsettle the colonial structures that remains in both educational and research structures, but also in general structures - and she does this by creating pathways of doing this diffently, not to be different, but to create spaces to do some of these in our ways and views.
This created a Film during her master thesis, as the first Kalaaleq to make a film as a master thesis - "From were we view the world".
She is also in Aarhus University, as to work with among others Naja Dyrendom Graugaard and the team 'Playing with ghost' - in collaboration, creation and ways of unsettling the colonial narrative - give space to ways and stories that are our own.
Christoffer Kølvraa is Associate Professor of European Studies at the Department of Global Studies, Aarhus University.
He is especially interested the role of play in various and unexpected political contexts, such as far right populism, neo-fascism and culturally conservative modes of nostalgia, as well as in how ideas of play have been central to a long line of European cultural, social and political theories and avant-garde practices from surrealism to post-structuralism. He is currently finishing a book on extreme right works of fiction.
Asge Matthiesen is a Scientific Assistant at an internal research institution at the University of Southern Denmark (www.sdu.dk).
Asge is a civil engineer with a recent PhD degree in virtual reality and health. He is a mediator of technology and the usage of this within the society and the understanding of designing for and with users in the center of a design process. His interests span across learning and immersive technologies as well as user design and understanding methods for designing and communication with various user groups. He is currently teaching and supervising students at the university
Rashin Fahandej is an Iranian-American futurist, immersive storyteller, and cultural activist.
Fahandej’s artistic initiatives are multiyear experimental laboratories for collective radical reimaginations of social systems, using counter-narratives of care and community co-creation to design equitable futures. Her projects center on marginalized voices and the role of media, technology, and public collaboration in generating emotional connections to drive social change. A proponent of “Art as Ecosystem,” she defines her projects as a “Poetic Cyber Movement for Social Justice,” where art mobilizes a plethora of voices by creating connections between public places and virtual spaces.
As a 2020 lead artist at American Arts Incubator-Austria with ZERO1 and the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, Fahandej launched “Future of Inclusion Lab” in partnership with Ars Electronica; an experimental virtual laboratory to incubate ideas and project prototypes that aim for collective and radical imaginations of our social systems, centered on art, emerging technology, and community co-creation.
